Hedda Schupak

The Internet Is A Brave New World
November 18, 2006

For the past two days, I’ve been attending a seminar about online publishing. As you can see by our new JCKOnline website, all things cyber have been top-of-mind for us lately.

But in the past few weeks, I’ve been struck by how much things have changed regarding the online world. It’s like we collectively hit Malcom Gladwell’s proverbial tipping point, where the Web has become a central part of our lives. Certainly that’s what drove us to take a gutsy look at our own online presence and where we wanted to go with it.

Case in point: It’s the middle of November, and aside from the preview trailer I was forwarded from a friend in the industry, I’ve not personally seen any trailers or ads for the Blood Diamond movie. So, thinking perhaps the fuss was all for naught, I asked my staff if they’d seen any.

Yes, they chorused. There was an ad for it during the Giants game. Ok, fair enough, I’m an Eagles fan, not a Giants fan, and even at that I rarely watch TV and I missed the Eagles-Redskins game last week. But the most telling was when Rob Bates said, “yeah, it’s been running online for weeks now!”

Movie trailers online? That’s a new revelation to me. I’m not especially wired by today’s standards. I get online for work, of course, and to do some personal research like news, weather, directions, phone numbers, and the like. I occasionally shop online, but I’m not connected to any of the social networking sites like YouTube or MySpace.

Obviously, somewhere along the line, I’ve become a fossil without realizing it, because social networking online is totally where it’s at, to use a probably-outdated youth phrase.

That was the point of the conference I attended. It was not so much about social networking, but about the myriad ways we all use the Net to tune in to life, and how any company that wants to survive in the coming decades not only needs to have a presence online, but needs to have a relevant presence online.

I also read a scary article today about how the Washington Post—whose circulation, like many newspapers, is suffering due to the Internet—is cutting staff. When such esteemed publications as the Post are struggling to retain readers, it’s clear there’s been a shift to a brave new world where cyber wins out over paper. The executive editor, Leonard Downie, Jr., tried his best to put a positive spin on it, but the message is still clear: declining revenues means drastic reductions in expenses, which translates to cutting heads.

I think it’s the wrong approach. Admittedly, being a chief editor, I come at this from a somewhat biased viewpoint, but I think Downie is losing sight of the fact that the need for good news reporting hasn’t changed, and the process by which good credible news is gathered and reported hasn’t changed. All that has changed is the vehicle by which it’s delivered. He shouldn’t, therefore, be losing readers—he should simply be going with them into the space they’ve clearly told him they plan to be. If he is losing readers, perhaps it’s because he’s not giving them content they consider relevant to their lives.

In fact, in the wild cyber-world, it’s more essential than ever to have good, solid, credible, dependable journalism. When anyone with a keyboard and a mouse can present themselves as a citizen journalist, the need for properly trained journalists who understand the principles of objective reporting and who are willing to be held accountable for what they write is critical.

The Internet is an endless field of information, but without an effective guide, it’s a minefield of information—some of which is flat-out wrong and can actually harm you or your business if you use it to base decisions on it without verifying its accuracy.

There’s nothing wrong with the Internet as a vehicle to deliver information, products, whatever. But that’s all it is—a vehicle. We’re the ones who are, in the end, responsible for what goes into that vehicle.

Posted by Hedda Schupak on November 18, 2006 | Comments (1)